Remnants of Revenants: The Role of the Dreaded

Draugr in Medieval Iceland

By Mistresss Caitlin Christiana Wintour
Just as the day is given over to the living, the night is the domain of the dead.
Brigid, Abbess of the Monastery of Saint Laurent

European legends of deadly revenants date from ancient Germanic folklore and literature.
Like their ghostly namesake, the stories were resurrected in post-Icelandic Conversion
sagas and in medieval ghost stories from northern England.
The term revenant is a French term for ghost, derived from the verb revenir, to
return. The Icelandic term is more specific to the returning and violently unhappy dead:
the feared draugr. These Scandinavian ghosts are almost always purely physical. They
rise from the burial grounds (howes), bash the living, and generally make horrible
nuisances of themselves until heroes overpower them and destroy their corpses for good.
They owe their place in folklore to earlier Germanic literature: a heroic and supernatural
tradition that shows up in the medieval Icelandic sagas and ghost stories from northern
England.

Tracing the Ancient Germanic Story

The Vikings brought the ancient Germanic literary tradition from Scandinavia to the rest
of Europe. The literary form survived in several related language groups including
Anglo-Saxon (Old English), Old Saxon, Old and Middle High German, and Old
Icelandic. Not all of the Germanic influences stayed strong -- the Vikings who settled in
non-Scandinavian countries readily adopted Christianity and dropped their pagan
practices and beliefs, and by the mid-11th century Christianity was well established in
Denmark and most of Norway. (Sweden eventually followed suit in the mid-12th
century.) Since Viking settlers eventually assimilated into well-entrenched Christian
cultures in England and the Continent, the Germanic literary tradition of heroic sagas and
violent ghosts paled against the French courtly traditions and Arthurian romances.i (In
England, the Viking influence that spawned Beowulf and the gruesome ghost stories of
Yorkshire came from north and east England the territory of the Viking Danelaw.)
However, ancient Germanic tradition thrived in Iceland where the Viking settlers did not
have to contend with a native culture. Even though Iceland converted to Christianity in
1000 A.D., its 12th to 14th century poets and writers produced an amazing body of work
modeled on the ancient Germanic traditions of their Viking ancestors -- complete with
Germanic monsters, gods, heroes and ghosts.

The Scandinavian Ghost Story

A common element in the Icelandic sagas is the hostile corporeal ghost, the draugr.
Draugr differ in some details, but they share important characteristics. They were
physical spirits, and intimidating ones: large and strong, they were often described as
being as big as a cow (neat). They were far heavier than even their large bodies make
them, and were difficult or impossible to carry or drag. The closer a draugr got to a
church dragged by men who were tired of being attacked -- the heavier it would get.
They were usually violent and often stupid, although occasionally one would spout a
sophisticated prophetic utterance.ii
Their resting place was quite important in the draugr scheme of things. Scandinavian
barrows, called howes, were reported to be ringed by barrow fires that formed a barrier
between the living and dead worlds. In The Saga of Grettir, Grettir sees such a flame on
the barrow of Kar the Old. Grettir commented that the fires may signal the presence of
buried treasure, but the farmer he was speaking to replied, The owner of this fire, I
think, is one whom it is better not to enquire about."
Some draugr stayed in their howe, only stirring themselves to attack grave robbers and
treasure hunters who ventured to enter their domain. Other draugr would poke about just
outside their howes, waylaying any beast or human unlucky enough to pass by too
closely. In these cases, moving the howe to a more remote site usually stopped the
attacks. However, the most feared and violent of all the draugr would roam an entire
region. These draugr traveled into towns and broke into great halls to kill people and
animals and to ride the rooftops of the houses, apparently a favorite sport among the
giant-like creatures.

The Draugr at Home or Not

Unliving in the Howe. Of all the draugr, the least dangerous was the haugbi, or howedweller. They could be as violent and deadly as any other revenant, but since they stayed
in their howes their victims usually brought their fate on themselves. Some haugbi
attacked physically as they would have in life, but others were capable of using evil
magic against trespassers, or were so plague-ridden and noisome that the living would
flee or be overcome by the fumes. According to the Danish history Saxo Grammaticus,
the evil sorcerer Mithothyns corpse "emitted such foul plagues that he almost seemed to
leave more loathsome reminders of himself dead than when alive."
Sometimes the living came seeking advice, helpful spells or items they had some right to.
In the 14th century Hervarar Saga, Chapter IV, a female warrior named Hervr insisted
on visiting the haunted island where her father and uncles were buried so she could claim
a famous sword from her fathers grave. When she approached, she saw cold fires blazing
around the howes and the dead men standing in the dark doorways. She roused them by
reciting a ritualistic verse claiming her right to speak with the dead:iii
Awake, Angantr! Hervr rouses you
Only daughter of you and Tfa....

Hervarr, Hjrvarr, Hrani, Angantr,

I rouse you all from under the roots.

Her father seems nice enough about it, but warns her about her actions:
Hervr, daughter, why call you so?
Why such fell curses? You do yourself ill.
Mad must you be, all too witless,
And lost to wisdom to rouse dead men.

Indeed the sword Tyrving was cursed, and the girls comment at the end of the chapter
proved prophetic:
I seemed to be lost between the worlds,
While around me burned the fires

Around the Howe. Some draugr would leave their howe to haunt the surrounding
countryside, attacking people or animals that approached too closely. In these cases, the
living would move the howe to a more remote place. This often did the trick, since the
revenant would only charge out of its resting place if a living being got too close. This
happened in a morbidly funny story where a cruel and violent man named Hrapp insisted
to his wife Vigdis that she bury him upright underneath the doorway of his great hall
(fire hall) so he could keep a more searching eye on my dwelling. When he died she
buried him according to his wishes, too frightened to do anything else. Sadly he kept
walking out of the grave and killing the servants, so Vigdis left to live with her brother.
The hero Hoskuld took his men and went to Hrappstead, dug Hrapp out of the floor, and
buried him in a remote place. This cut down on Hrapps walking about, but a curse
seemed to cling to Hrappstead. After her son died there in a frenzy Vigdis flat-out
refused to go home.iv (Laxdaela Saga, Chapter XVII)
Wide-Ranging Revenants. Some draugr were so driven, strong and bold that they left
their howes far behind to ravage an entire region. These powerful draugr ripped great
hall doors off their frames, danced on town roofs, and smashed beasts and humans to
smithereens. The story of Grendel from Beowulf is this type of draugr, and so is the
revenant Glam from the Grettis Saga.

Living with the Dead

The living had several weapons in their arsenal for foiling the draugr, including
cremation. Cremation was by no means limited to the laying the dead, but it was a
common way to dispose of stubbornly active corpses. It usually worked like a charm, but
there were exceptions. In the Eyrbyggja Saga, the hero Thorod came to the aid of one of
his bonders. A dead man named Thorolf Haltfoot was haunting Lairstead and killing both
men and beasts. Thorod was reluctant to deal with the matter, but was duty-bound to do
so. He called his men to him and came to Thorolfs howe. When they found him there he
was even yet unrotten, and as like to a fiend as like could be, blue as hell, and big as a
neat cow; and when they went about the raising of him, they could in nowise stir him.

Thinking fast, Thorod and his men gathered logs and placed them under the monster to
lever him up and roll him down the hillside. There they burned the corpse, and a stiff
breeze carried most of the ashes out to sea. Unfortunately for Thorod, a few of the ashes
landed on a rock and a cow licked them up. She eventually gave birth to a huge bull calf,
which bellowed in the voice of a demon and gored Thorod to death (Eyrbyggja Saga,
Chapter LXIII).
Some draugr never even made it to the howe before being burned. In the Flamanna
Saga, a witchs body kept trying to get up and kill people on its way to the burial ground,
so the exasperated bearers put her down and burned the corpse.
Due to the threat of the roaming daugr, most Icelanders knocked on doors using code.
This is because one night, an unfortunate servant heard a single loud knock on his lords
door and went to investigate. He was a long time returning, and when his master and men
went out to look for him they found him stark raving mad from sighting a draugr
(Floamanna Saga). To make sure this didnt happen to them; most Icelanders would
knock on each others door three times after dark. Only evil creatures would give one
thundering knock.
Weather and the time of year also played a part in hauntings. The worse the weather was
the worse the attacks; which made draugr invasions quite the problem in the winter time.
Some draugr didnt have to wait for weather, but could create their own darkness or mist
to hide their actions in daylight.v
Not all revenants were that bad. One ghost walked after death but was frightened by the
living and ran away, while another was rather sad. This ghost, from the Svarfdla Saga,
was a warrior named Klaufi. Klaufi was murdered and returned to haunt the woman who
caused his death. The womans brothers cut the corpses head off, but Klaufi simply
tucked his head under his arm and kept on coming. He spoke with his kinsmen, who
fought to avenge him, but later decided that Klaufi was a bit too active and burned him to
ashes.
Sometimes the revenants appear in groups, as with the plague victims from Eyrbyggja
Saga who try to come back home, and a crew of drowned sailors who drippingly appear
in the Laxdaela Saga. In all these cases, when the bodies are dug up and burned the
hauntings stop.vi
Sometimes householders took matters into their own hands and made sure the dead
couldnt return home they knocked a hole in a wall and took the corpse out that way,
then walled it up again. Since a corpse could only come back the way it had been brought
out, it would be confronted by a solid wall!
Contemporary Iceland was Christian, and many of the anti-draugr measures had
Christian elements. In the story of Glam from the Grettis Saga, the men who found
Glams cursed corpse fetched a Christian priest to exorcise it, but Glams body
disappeared until the priest gave up and went away. Icelandic priests were apparently

used to dealing with the walking dead and didnt turn a hair when asked to protect their
flock against a revenant. In the Eyrbyggja Saga, the Christian priest Arnkel builds a high
wall around the suspect grave of Thorolf Halt-Foot. And Snorri the Priest, the lead
character in the saga, advises a haunted community to use a sort of ghost trial to banish
errant spirits.
Not all revenants come back on their own power but are forced back by witchcraft and
sorcery. The Saxo Grammaticus, Book I tells the story of an unsavory giantess and shapechanger named Hardgrep. She raised an orphaned prince named Hadding from birth, and
then later seduced him.
The two traveled together, and one night they passed a hut where a man had died.
Hardgrep practiced black arts to draw the spirit back from the underworld. The spirit cried
out and cursed Hardgrep: "For when the black pestilence of the blast that engenders
monsters has crushed out the inmost entrails with stern effort, and when their hand has
swept away the living with cruel nail, tearing off limbs and rending ravished bodies; then
Hadding, thy life shall survive, nor shall the nether realms bear off thy ghost, nor thy spirit
pass heavily to the waters of Styx; but the woman who hath made the wretched ghost
come back hither, crushed by her own guilt, shall appease our dust; she shall be dust
herself. That same night, a disembodied giants hand tore Hardgrep to pieces in front of
Hadding.

It was a fearful thing to rouse the dead.

Many of the draugr are outright jealous of the living, which fueled their attacks. They are
also really, really hungry. One encounter in Gautreks Saga (also told in Saxo
Grammaticus), was between the sword brothers Aran and Asmund. The two of them had
sworn to each other that when one of them died, the other would keep watch for three
days inside the howe. Aran later died, so Asmund brought Arans living hound, hawk and
horse with him into the howe and settled down to wait. The first night, Arans corpse got
up and killed and ate the hawk and hound, and the second night did the same to his horse.
The third night Asmund stared to feel drowsy, and before he knew it Aran was munching
on his ears. One assumes that Asmund left after that.vii

The Draugr in a Green and Pleasant Land

Surviving English heroic lays and some strange tales from Yorkshire bear a strong
resemblance to the Scandinavian revenant stories. Although Germanic literary influence
was faint in England, some early Anglo-Saxon poetry included the heroic lays
characteristic of the Germanic tradition. Some of these surviving works include Beowulf,
The Battle of Maldon, Cynewulf and Cyneheard, and The Battle at Finnsburhviii. The
strongest parallel between these works and the Icelandic draugr is the monster Grendel
from Beowulf. This famous English heroic poem is the subject of debate as to the time (or
times) it was written and its authors. It is from the Scandinavian literary tradition with its
verse form, hero and supernatural monsters, and Scandinavian setting. Just like the
terrible draugr Glam from the Grettis Saga, Beowulfs Grendel is huge and bloated,
possesses terrible strength, has glowing eyes, and insists on breaking into royal halls.ix

Grendels mother, who was even worse than Grendel, also has roots in the Scandinavian
ghost story. Some Icelandic sagas refer to the mother of a dead revenant, who sports long
claws and is even stronger than her draugr son.
Other draugr-like ghosts appear in a set of Yorkshire tales from William of Newburgh.
William, a Yorkshire monk born in 1136, wrote an English history called Historia Rerum
Anglicarum and included reports of hauntings in contemporary Scotland,
Buckinghamshire and Yorkshire. The stories with their threatening corporeal ghosts were
quite unusual for the England of miracula and mirabilia literature, and display a
commonality with the Scandinavian revenant stories.
One of the stories concerns a revenant from Buckinghamshire with distinct similarities to
Hrapp from the Laxdaela Saga, the draugr who haunted his own house. After the
Buckinghamshire man died, his ghost repeatedly entered his house and kept trying to
sleep with his wife. The alarmed woman fought him off three nights in a row, at which
point she got people to stay with her. The ghost then turned from her to haunting his
brothers in the same house, and when they got companions too he started to annoy the
local livestock. The community sought advice from their Archdeacon, who in turn
consulted the bishop of Lincoln. The bishops advisors told him quite candidly that it was
common to dig up the body of the restless dead and cremate it another holdover from
Scandinavian ghost stories and folklore. But the bishop was appalled at the idea and
instead told the community to open the grave, place a scroll of absolution from the bishop
on the corpses chest, and close it up again. This was done, and to the communitys vast
relief the man lay still after that. William included several more ghost stories starring the
physical undead. One blood-sucking ghost, an early form of vampire, is also found in the
Saxo Grammaticus.
An anonymous monk from the Cistercian abbey of Byland in Yorkshire reported another
set of alarming regional hauntings. One of them is the ghost of a former mercenary
soldier that takes the form of a rearing horse, then changes into a haystack with a light in
the middle of it, and finally assumes a human shape. In this shape, he suggests that the
living man he is confronting carry the ghosts sack of beans as far as a waterfall! Other
ghosts from the Byland reports are quite similar to Scandinavian draugr. In one of them,
a revenant named Robert escapes from the cemetery every night to scare the nearby town
and make the dogs howl. And the ghost of a curate is even worse he comes back to visit
one of his ex-mistresses and gouges out her eyes.
The livings defense is also similar to the Scandinavian tales. The wicked curate is dug up
and thrown into a pond, and a large villager manages to hold the ravaging Robert at the
cemetery entrance until a local priest could arrive to exorcise it.

Conclusion
The Germanic tradition of the dangerous dead lived on in the folklore and tales of the
Vikings. Carried to other lands by their raids and settlements, the stories of the hideous
draugr were preserved in Icelandic literature and English folklore. The message of the

draugr stories was clear: revenants threatened the natural order and must be banished to
the underworld. Divine power, heroic strength, and common courage would triumph over
the power of darkness. Witness the draugr/monster Grendels bleak and lonely end:
The end of Grendel's life was
miserable, and he would travel
far into the hands of fiends.
Grendel, the foe of God, who had
long troubled the spirits of men
with his crimes, found that
his body could not stand against
the hand grip of that warrior.
Each was hateful to the other
alive. The horrible monster endured
a wound: the bone-locks
of his shoulder gave way,
and his sinews sprang out.
The glory of battle went to
Beowulf, and Grendel,
mortally wounded,
sought his sad home
under the fen slope.x

Works Cited
Beowulf. (11th century). Author unknown. Translated by David Breeden. Retrieved
January 2005 from http://www.lnstar.com/literature/beowulf.
Ellis, Hilda Roderick. (1968). The Road to Hel. New York: Greenwood Press.
Eyrbyggja Saga: The Story of the Ere-Dwellers (13th century). Author unknown.
Translated by William Morris and Eirikr Magnusson (1892). London: Bernard
Quaritch.
Grettis Saga: The Story of Grettir the Strong. (14th century). Author unknown. Translated
from the Icelandic by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris (1869). London: F.
S. Ellis.
Laxdaella Saga (1245) Author unknown. Translated by Muriel Press (1899). London:
The Temple Classics.
Norton Anthology of English Literature, Norton Topics Online. (2005). The Linguistic
and Literary Contexts of Beowulf. Retrieved January 2005 from
http://www.wwnorton.com/nael/middleages/topic_4/saxongen.htm.
Poetic Edda (13th century). Author unknown. Translated from the Icelandic by Benjamin
Thorpe (1856).
Public Broadcast Television. (2004). Warrior Challenge: Vikings. Retrieved January
2005 from http://www.pbs.org/wnet/warriorchallenge/vikings/time.html.
Saxo. Saxo Grammaticus (13th century). Translated by Oliver Elton (1905). New York:
Norroena Society.

Simpson, Jacqueline. (1998). Ghosts in Medieval Yorkshire. In Ghosts and Scholars,

Issue 27, retrieved October 2004 from
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~pardos/ArticleThree.html.

Endnotes
i

Examples are the Breton lays written by Marie de France (1170), and Geoffrey of Monmouths history of

Arthur in his Historia (c.1135).

ii

Both the draugr Glam in The Grettis Saga and the newly dead man in Saxo Grammaticus accurately

predicted death and destruction to their enemies.

iii

Other seekers spoke similar lines to awaken magical beings and witches who could give them wisdom or

spells.
iv

Since the move to a remote area proved to be insufficient, another hero named Olaf eventually wrestled

with the revenant, won, and burned the corpse. This was the end of the matter, though Vigdis never did go
home.
v

The medieval Arab traveler Ahmed ibn Foszlan (or Fadlan) reported that a bestial demon-race was able to
raise a mist to cover its attacks. Foszlans diaries were popularized in Michael Crightons Eaters of the
Dead and the movie The 13th Warrior.
vi
The living had to do something the dead sailors were holding mud fights every night and ruining the
hall (Eyrbyggja Saga).
vii

In an early section of this strange saga, members of a particular family have a habit of climbing up a peak

and jumping to their deaths for the most trivial of reasons, including head colds.
viii

ix

The Battle of Finnsburh only survives in a fragment of a longer poem, but Beowulf retells it.

. Unlike many of the Scandinavian sagas, which were written by Christian authors but do not contain

Christian elements, the Beowulf poet makes frequent comments about God. Grendel is even descended
from Cains cursed line.
x

Beowulf, Chapter IV.